Mirage Man

by Trace Conger

  Messner's thick office doors swung open. I turned to find Tabitha charging me with a sawed-off shotgun. The thing looked like a tree trunk in her hands. She braced it against her shoulder and trained it at my gut. Then she looked past me to see Messner finding his breath again.

  "Get the fuck out, Connor," he whispered.

  Tabitha stepped a few feet back, still gripping the smoke pole in her hands. I can read people pretty well, and everything about this woman told me she wouldn't hesitate to blow me in two, not even for a second.

  I raised my hands and walked out of Messner's office feeling Tabitha's heavy stare behind me. My cell was on top of her desk, but I had to open the desk drawer to find my .45. I picked it up with my thumb and index finger and slowly slipped it back into my shoulder holster. She inched closer to me as I grabbed the cell and retreated to the elevator. I could still hear Messner gasping for air in his office. She didn't lower the shotgun until sometime after the elevator door closed.

  I walked out of the building's lobby faster than when I walked in. When I reached 14th Street, I threw my arm up and a cab pulled to the curb. I climbed in.

  "Where to, friend?" The cabbie had a thick Middle Eastern accent.

  "Harlem. One forty-two and Lenox."

  He popped the cab into gear and squealed away from the curb, cutting off a delivery truck in the process.

  I thought I'd get further with Messner, but given the security around MCC, I wasn't surprised he shut me down. While Messner was the first string I could pull to get next to Sontag, he wasn't the only one. I had another option.

  A much more deadly one.

  10

  Zoe Armstrong

  Just like Mr. Fish in Boston, I made a habit of knowing people who knew people. It was my version of professional networking, without the business cards or lunch and learns. Work in this business long enough and eventually you're going to need help, and it's better to know who to call before you need it.

  Zoe Armstrong was the first person in my mental Rolodex. She was intelligent, savvy, and damn dangerous. A lethal combination. She was the type of woman who would charm your pants off and then shoot you in the kneecaps. She ran the Whisper Network, an underground information syndicate that provided intelligence and related services to all of New York City's criminal organizations. She was unique in that most everyone in the game was loyal to one organization or another. The large crime clans liked it that way because there was little chance of spilling trade secrets to the competition. Crossing family lines was often a death sentence, but not for Zoe. She played every angle, refusing to take sides and working for anyone who had the means to pay for her services. And the clans let her get away with it because she was too valuable to put out of business. They needed access to her list of services, even if monogamy wasn't on that list.

  The brilliance of Zoe's operation was that no one knew who worked for her. She was plugged into every vein and artery in the city. Politicians, police, prostitutes, dealers, junkies, doormen, and paperboys. She knew how to work them all, which is why when it came to getting something she usually made it happen.

  One of my last assignments before I retired was to recover four hundred grand from the trunk of a Lincoln sitting at the bottom of the Narrows. One of Sontag's bagmen was crossing the Verrazano Bridge en route to the clan's Brooklyn HQ when someone drove up alongside him and opened fire. I suppose the shooter was looking to relieve Sontag's man of his six-figure payload, but while blowing a driver to bits is an effective way to get him to stop his vehicle, doing it on a bridge isn't.

  Instead of bleeding out and slowly coming to a stop on the side of the road, Sontag's man ripped through the bridge's barricade and plummeted into the Narrows. Four hundred grand isn't a write-off, which is why Sontag came to me. Then I went to Zoe. The next day, I handed my boss three hundred grand in wet bills. Zoe and I pocketed fifty grand each for our trouble. Finding someone who could locate the car in forty-five feet of dark abyss, crack the trunk, and retrieve the cash was one thing, but finding someone who could beat the NYPD scuba team to the bottom and then keep their mouth shout afterward was something else. I wasn't surprised she made it happen. That's what Zoe Armstrong did.

  Zoe wasn't hard to find. She operated out of her jazz club, Hoster Hall, in Harlem. It wasn't the Cotton Club, but it was dark, cozy, and the music wasn't bad either. The live jazz wouldn't start until eight o'clock tonight, but the doors were already open when I arrived around noon.

  When I opened the door, the three men sitting at the bar winced and shielded their eyes as the sunlight burst in like a broken dam. I pulled the door closed and took a seat at the bar.

  A lean, tall bartender in a black vest, white collared shirt, and black slacks tossed his Sports Illustrated magazine onto the bar next to me.

  "What can I get for you?"

  According to my watch, it was too early for scotch.

  "Root beer," I said.

  The bartender cocked his ear toward me as if he didn't hear me correctly. "Root beer? Like A&W?"

  "Or Barq's. I'm not picky."

  He waited for a moment to see if I was joking. Then he filled a rocks glass with ice, topped it off with the pistol-shaped soda gun, and set it in front of me. He rapped his fingers on the bar. "Want to open a tab, or are you one and done?"

  I tossed a hundred on the bar and told him to keep it.

  "Is Zoe in?"

  The bartender stashed the bill in his vest pocket, crossed his arms, and propped his leg up on the three-compartment sink. "No. Might be back later though."

  "I'll wait."

  He nodded. "Take table twenty-two. Maybe she'll see you when she comes back."

  I grabbed the glass and swiped an abandoned newspaper on my way to the back of the club. On the side of each table was a numbered bronze plaque the size of a checkerboard square. I struggled to read the table numbers in the dark, but I finally found table twenty-two at the back, next to the stage. The club was empty except for me, the bartender, and the three men at the bar. Not surprising. The club didn't serve food, and there was little reason to be at a jazz club with no jazz.

  I leaned back in the hard chair and exchanged glances between the newspaper and the front door. An hour of reading and two root beer refills later, the barrel of a handgun pressed against the back of my head.

  "Connor Harding. I almost forgot what you looked like from behind."

  I turned around slowly to see my reflection in Zoe's mirrored sunglasses. She jostled a microphone in her hand.

  "You almost gave me a heart attack," I said.

  "I have that effect on people."

  "How'd you know it was me?"

  She nodded to a small smoke detector mounted to the ceiling—a video camera.

  "You been here this entire time?" I said.

  "No, I just got here."

  "I've been watching the front door, waiting for you."

  "Only assholes use the front door." She smiled. "How's Boston?"

  "You keeping tabs on me?"

  "Just like to know where all the game pieces are, that's all."

  "I'm not in the game anymore."

  She tapped the microphone on the left side of my jacket near my ribs. "Your forty-five says otherwise. I assume it's still a forty-five."

  "Old habits."

  "So why are you here? Our root beer isn't that good."

  "There someplace private we can talk?"

  Zoe led me around the back of the stage to a trapdoor in the floor. She swung it open, revealing a spiral staircase to the basement.

  "After you," I said.

  "No." She waited until I stepped down in front of her.

  The basement was much brighter than the dim club above. Zoe had furnished the space like an apartment. There was a living room with a sofa, two chairs, and four video monitors, each linked to cameras in the club upstairs. Off to one side was a kitchen, next to that a bathroom, and then a door that led to a bedroom.

  "You live here?"
r />   "Sometimes." She dropped the microphone, grabbed a small gadget from her purse, and waved it around me.

  "I'm not wearing a wire."

  "Everyone who ever wore a wire said they weren't wearing a wire."

  Satisfied I was clean, she dropped the device back into her purse. Even though Zoe was concerned about a listening device hidden somewhere on me, she dismissed the .45 she knew I had. She was either confident I wasn't here to kill her or had taken other precautions to ensure I wouldn't be successful if I were.

  "Lot of people on edge around here," she said. "Don't know who you can trust anymore." She whipped her long black hair over her shoulder, sat on the sofa, and adjusted her sunglasses.

  Zoe always wore sunglasses. She didn't like people seeing her eyes, though she never told me why. This pair, aviators with gold frames, was too big for her narrow face.

  "So what can I do for you, Connor Harding?"

  "I need to talk to Joseph Sontag."

  "You know he's in federal holding, right?"

  "I know. That's why I'm here. You have any connection there? Someone who can get me in?"

  She fiddled with the leather strap on her purse. "Why do you want to see him?"

  I told her about Lucky Walsh.

  "You believe Sontag was behind it?"

  I thought about Alfie O'Bannon writhing on the floor of the Busted Knuckle with a bullet hole in his leg. "I've got a solid lead that someone in Sontag's crew called in the hit, but I talked to Porter last night and he said he didn't know anything about it."

  "You talked to Porter? He tell you about Nicky?"

  "Yeah, which is why I'm thinking maybe the contracts on me and Nicky are connected."

  "If I didn't know better, I'd say someone was thinning Sontag's herd," she said.

  "Could be, but is it coming from inside or outside the family?"

  "Hard to say. Maybe it's connected to the informant."

  "What informant?"

  "You talked to Porter and he didn't mention it?"

  Zoe was normally tight-lipped. She'd either made a rare misstep or wanted me to think she had.

  "He never mentioned anything about an informant," I said.

  She hesitated for a moment. "Word is someone on the inside brought Sontag down. Porter is trying to suss out who."

  "He said he was focused on disrupting the investigation against Sontag but didn't say anything about a mole."

  "What better way to disrupt a federal investigation than eliminate the key witness?"

  "Is that why Nicky went underground?"

  "No one will ever convince me that Nicky flipped on his own father. No way. I don't know who it is. And I assume Sontag and Porter don't know either, otherwise NYPD would be finding body parts in all five boroughs." She ran her black fingernails up and down her jeans leg. "Maybe Sontag suspected it was you. Whoever it was gave the feds enough information to take him to trial. You'd have a lot of knowledge about the inner workings of the clan. Maybe Joseph thought you were the informant and sent this Lucky..."

  "Walsh. Lucky Walsh. You think I'd talk to the feds?"

  "No, but it really doesn't matter what I think, does it? The real question is whether Joseph believes you talked."

  "All the more reason to chat with him face-to-face," I said. "So, can you get me inside or not?"

  "Just to make sure we're on the same page here, you're asking me if I can get you inside a federal detention facility to meet with one of the most wanted men in New York?"

  "That's about right."

  "To be honest, I don't know about this one. Give me some time and I'll see what I can do. It's not a typical job."

  "You don't deal in typical jobs, Zoe."

  "I'll look into it. I might have a contact who can help, but no promises."

  "No promises."

  "What's a good way to reach you?" she asked.

  I gave her my cell phone number. Zoe didn't write it down. She never wrote anything down.

  "You can also find me at Hotel Beacon."

  "Now why would I ever go to your hotel?"

  "It's not a solicitation," I said. "But if we need to talk in person, you know where to find me."

  "I'll keep that in mind. Go back to your hotel and wait for a call. If my guy can help, you'll probably have to do him a favor."

  "Understood. Maybe you can help me with something else. Porter's convinced someone's making a power play for Sontag's throne. He asked me to look into it."

  "Is that why you're really pumping me for information? You're working for Porter now?"

  "I'm not working for anyone. I'm only concerned about who tried to off me, but if these two storylines are connected, investigating one might give me something on the other."

  She nodded. "If you're asking me who tried to kill Nicky, I have no idea, but it's not surprising. Everyone knows he's weak."

  "Everyone is weak compared to Sontag."

  "Yeah, but Nicky isn't leadership material. If it wasn't for his old man, he'd have been run out of the city years ago. I wouldn't want to work for him."

  "So you do think there's a power struggle?"

  "Yes, I do. And my sources are telling me it's only a matter of time before Spiro and Napoli start scarfing up Joseph's territory."

  Alfred Spiro and Armand Napoli ran the other two crime clans in New York City, and they were chomping at the bit to ravage Sontag's operation and claim it for themselves.

  "That's bad news," Zoe continued. "If Joseph's clan crumbles and Spiro and Napoli control the city, then it'll be an all-out war until only one remains. Three clans keep the peace, but two is a clusterfuck waiting to happen."

  "You backing a horse in this race?"

  "I like Joseph. He's always been good to me, but who knows what the hell is going to happen with the Sontag Clan."

  "You didn't answer my question."

  Zoe adjusted her sunglasses again.

  "No, Connor, I don't have a horse in this race. I'll keep on doing what I do regardless of who's running this city. That's the benefit of my situation. Nimble as a goddamn cat. I'll survive no matter who's in the driver's seat."

  "You sure know a lot about what's happening around here."

  "It's my business to know what's going on, and speaking of business, I've got some I need to get to. See yourself out, and keep that phone handy. My man will be in touch if MCC is a go."

  I stood up and thanked her.

  "And, Connor. Be careful. There's a lot of heat out there. I'd keep an eye over your shoulder."

  "Why does everyone keep telling me that?"

  "Because a lot has changed since you disappeared. There's landmines all over the place, and you're walking around in a pair of those big-ass clown shoes."

  "I'll be as careful as I can."

  "See that you do."

  There were no cabs outside Zoe's club, so I started walking, keeping an eye out for darting yellow blurs. Before I could spot one, someone else spotted me.

  The sedan pulled up behind me. Hugging the curb, its tires rubbed against the street's gutter. I heard and felt it before I saw it.

  "What are you doing around here?"

  I turned around, slipping my hand inside my jacket. I didn't feel as though I was in danger—this was too public a place to take a shot at me—but the passenger's question did up my heartbeat.

  "Just seeing an old friend," I said, stopping. "There a problem with that?"

  "No problem, Connor."

  The sedan was a Toyota Camry. The passenger was male, about mid-forties, and he hung out the window like he was reaching for something. The driver was also male, same age.

  These guys wore suits. Most criminals don't wear suits or drive Camrys, which is why I relaxed a bit and left my .45 where it was.

  "There something I can do for you?" I asked. "Or are you just keen to bother me?"

  "What's your business with Lyle Messner?"

  "Never heard of him," I said.

  "You've never heard of Lyle Messner? Jos
eph Sontag's attorney?"

  "Nope."

  "Then why were you at his office an hour ago?"

  "Don't know what you're talking about. You've got me confused with someone else. I suggest you put that car in drive and roll away."

  "Nah. We don't have you confused with anyone, Connor Harding. We know who you are. Why are you back in New York?"

  "I don't know what you're talking about." I started walking. The car pulled away from the curb and followed.

  "You know, poking your head where it don't belong could get you in trouble, Connor. Especially if you're talking to Joseph Sontag's associates."

  "I don't know what you're talking about, but if you want to park that car and step out, follow me down this alley here and we could discuss it further."

  "Maybe another time, Connor. We got places to be, but we'll be seeing you again soon, I'm sure."

  "Bye," I said, waving over my shoulder.

  "One more question. How's Albert?"

  I stopped and went for my weapon, but the car sped off. The Camry had New York tags, but I didn't get the digits.

  11

  The Whisper Network

  The Camry made me uneasy. I didn't recognize the passenger or driver, and they weren't ready to tell me who they were, but they did intend to rattle me. Albert is my father, and while he was nowhere near New York, they obviously knew who he was. I received the subtle threat loud and clear.

  A cab picked me up a few blocks from Zoe's club and took me to the 79th Street subway entrance. Apparently, someone was watching me, and while the Camry sped off before I could make the plate, another vehicle might have picked up my tail. If someone was following me, I wasn't about to lead them to my hotel. I ducked into the subway entrance and took the Red Line to the next stop at 72nd Street and then walked the three blocks to the Hotel Beacon. It wasn't CIA-level counterespionage, but being underground for even a few blocks would throw off anyone tailing me on the street.